Friday's Favorite OTR

 Frontier Gentleman: "Aces and Eights" 

“In a card game, Aces and Eights are known throughout the West as a dead man’s hand. There’s a good reason for it and this is the story of how the hand got its name.”

Click HERE to listen or download. 

Friday's Favorite OTR

Frontier Gentleman: "Powder River Kid" 4/6/58

OPENING NARRATION: "There seems to be two kinds of people in Montana Territory: the good and the bad. Sometimes, it's hard to tell which is which."

While traveling back to Fort Benton, Kendall encounters a badly-wounded and dying outlaw. The dying man asks Kendall for a favor--something that would allow the man's wife to collect the reward. Kendall wants to help the man, but the favor would involve committing a an extremely brutal and cold-blooded act.

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Friday's Favorite OTR

Frontier Gentleman: "A Horse for Kendall" 9/14/58

Kendall gets involved in a 300-mile horse race. The other horses are faster than his--but this is a case where slow and steady might just really be the way to win a race.

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Friday's Favorite OTR

Frontier Gentleman: "The Honky Tonkers" 2/16/58

A man accidentally shoots himself when he tries to draw on Kendall. Kendall is tasked with trying to remove the bullet and save the guys life--with two saloon girls for nurses and with the locals betting on whether he succeeds.

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A new article by me.

Here's a new article I've written on the classic OTR shows Fort Laramie and Frontier Gentleman:

Fort Laramie/Frontier Gentleman

I based the articles in part on the Review and Episode Guides I've previously published on these shows. The links below are for the Kindle versions, though you can also get them for the Nook HERE.

Friday's Favorite OTR

Frontier Gentleman: “The Cowboy” 8/25/58

The tense climax of this strong episode is a great example of how radio professionals could effectively create complex and exciting action scenes without visuals, using just dialogue, narration and sound effects.

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Frontier Gentleman: A Review and Episode Guide ebook

I've published another Old-Time Radio Review and Episode Guide as an ebook:

It covers the excellent 1958 Western Frontier Gentleman, which starred John Dehner. Dehner plays a reporter with the London Times who travels the West in search of stories. It was a format that allowed the show to do episodes ranging from straight adventure to tragedy to comedy to quiet character studies.

Kendall was a gentleman--but he was no wimp. Carrying a Colt .44, Kendall was willing to become a participant in the stories he covered, never hesitating to defend the underdog. His barely-hinted-at background includes serving in the British Army in India, which gave him the skill he needed to survive in the violent American West.

One of several excellent mature Westerns that followed in the wake of Gunsmoke, Frontier Gentleman lasted 40 episodes.


Here's the Kindle Version: Frontier Gentleman

And here it is for the Nook: Frontier Gentleman

Friday's Favorite OTR

Frontier Gentleman: “The Cat Man” 8/10/58

An urge to help an outnumbered man in a saloon brawl leads to J.B. Kendall travelling with an Irishman whose mouth is full of blarney and whose wagon is full of… cats?

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Friday's Favorite OTR

Frontier Gentleman: "Kendall's Last Stand" 2/23/58


London Times correspondent J.B. Kendall is disappointed when he misses a chance to ride with Custer and the 7th Calvary to what is sure to be a big victory against Sitting Bull at Little Big Horn.

But he at least gets a chance to ride along with a smaller patrol. But when the overconfident officer leading the patrol rides into an ambush, Kendall finds himself trapped along with two others in an isolated cabin.


It's the sort of "last stand" situation that's been done a gazilion times, but can always make for good storytelling if the plot is well-structured and the characters are interesting. The story contains a remarkable level of tension and inherent tragedy. One of those trapped with Kendall is a woman who's son had just burned to death in a neighboring cabin, but she manages to pull herself together and remain useful. Played with a combination of quiet strength and restrained grief by Jeanette Nolan, she is a truly great character.


The third person in the cabin is a Crow army scout named Six-Toes. A scene in which Kendall and Six-Toes sneak out of the cabin to try to get a drop on the hostile Cheyenne builds into a violent and effective climax.


From start to finish, this is a superb example of one of radio's better Westerns.

Click HERE to listen or download

Friday's Favorite OTR

Frontier Gentleman: "Random Notes" 4/27/58


Frontier Gentleman, with John Dehner playing London Times reporter J.B. Kendall, was a great Western. It's format--which involved Kendall pretty much wandering around the Old West looking for human interest stories--allowed jump from adventure to tragedy to character studies to comedy.


"Random Notes," which consists of five or six quick vignettes rather than a single story, pretty much covers all this ground by itself. The highlight of the episode, though, is one of the funniest things I've ever heard. Kendall recounts a performance of Othello he saw in which the lead characters were played by a local theater group in Texas. Hearing a cowboy and his wife--in thick Texas drawls--mangle the lines and insert bits of Western slang while performing Desdemona's death scene is literally on-the-floor funny.



Click HERE to listen or download.